REVIEW: Under The Skin (2014)

Jonathan Glazer started off in advertisements and music videos and graduated into film with 2000’s Sexy Beast, an original but rather vacuous gangster film, which defied certain genre conventions in favour of directorial pyrotechnics and outlandish dream sequences. His new film, Under The Skin, seems to be trying to defy expectations with its mix of science fiction and kitchen sink drama tropes but remains equally shallow.

The film begins with what appears to be the movements of abstract circles of light, being reminiscent of both 2001: A Space Odyssey and the light inside a film projector. The soundtrack is eerie and formless, but we can just about make out a few repeated words. Finally, we realize that we are watching the creation of an eye and that this sequence represents an alien transforming into a human. Scarlett Johansson plays the alien wearing human skin. She drives around Glasgow in a big white van picking up men and inviting them back to her house where they are submerged in a strange black liquid and seemingly consumed. However, when the alien suddenly takes pity on one potential victim (Adam Pearson), it leads to her downfall.

Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey, Under The Skin becomes 10, Abbas Kiarostami’s film set entirely inside a taxi as a female taxi driver brings fairs from one place to another in an artistic conversation piece intended as a comment on contemporary Iran. In a much written about gimmick, Glazer had Johansson driving around Glasgow, approaching people who did not know that they were being filmed and invite them to get into her van. The film features scenes with these people, though there are a few actors who allow themselves to get picked up, including Paul Brannigan from The Angels’ Share. The apparent reason for this mixing of fact and fiction is supposedly that Johansson’s pretending to be an English woman picking up men will mirror the alien’s pretending to be an English woman picking up men. Or it could simply be read as an attempt on the part of Glazer to make the audience forget that Under The Skin stars Scarlett Johansson. Or it could merely be a gimmick to add a bit more interest to what are increasingly repetitive scenes. Although this creates an interesting mixture of what is essentially actuality footage with the more Kubrickian-Lynchian science fiction sequences, it is in many ways an artistic failure, since we never forget that it is Johansson onscreen, the scenes still become fairly tedious and it ultimately adds little to the film.

If the film is trying to show how different types of men react to an openly flirtatious woman, it would need to show more varied examples and to place more emphasis on this idea. Related to this, the carnivorous alien storyline could only really be construed as either unnecessary or rather misogynistic. The film’s ending takes on a deeply misogynistic reading as the “woman” having used her sexual powers over the men is punished by a man, who casually rapes and murders her. Under The Skin is left open for the audience but if it is supposed to be about more than one thing (what it is to be human is another, as are questions of vision and disguise) it should support such a multiplicity of meaning without suggesting a rather dodgy rape thriller.

The alien stops hunting men when it encounters a man suffering from the effects of neurofibromatosis. This leads to a deeply uncomfortable scene, not because we worry about what the alien is going to do, but because we wonder why Glazer is using such exploitative means to achieve some kind of outdated Beauty understanding the Beast scene. The scene is played for pity, not understanding and it is another instance of Glazer being provocative for effect rather than for meaning.

Once the alien gets out of her van, the film seems to be taking on a whole other meaning, becoming a story about an outsider trying to fit in but being totally overwhelmed by their harsh and incomprehensible environment. This is perhaps the film’s only consistent thread and it’s most successful. The film does manage to present the mundane real world from a different perspective, making the everyday look somehow otherworldly and often threatening. The film ends tragically, and yet the film is too cold and clinical and, by this point, too long for us to care too much. Glazer attempts to make it interesting by including one last provocation, the rape scene, which only makes the entire enterprise seem like a deeply misogynistic story about a strong and threatening woman bested by men’s natural power over women. Either that or a hip director saying nothing at all.

It is apparent that more thought went into the visuals and the production gimmicks than went into figuring out what the film is ultimately about. As with Sexy Beast, it is an exercise in genre pastiche, which becomes more tiresome and more vacuous as it proceeds. It ends up being nicely shot but thematically misguided and deeply dull. To describe it as experimental is misleading, because most experiments have a purpose.

REVIEW: Her (2014)

By a bizarre coincidence, I recently saw two films that sought to replay the typical tropes of the romantic film formula (loneliness, awkward first meeting, developing relationship, break-up and reconciliation) with a somewhat subversive edge. The first was reasonably funny and the second was, initially, reasonably intriguing, but neither proved particularly interesting. The first was 2009’s I Love You, Man, a film about the developing friendship between two men (Paul Rudd and Jason Segel) and the second film was Her.

Her is set in what is clearly supposed to be the not so distant future (although the film tries its best to undercut any science fiction feel the setting might generate). Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a lonely guy, in the middle of a divorce, looking for love. He writes love letters for people who can no longer be bothered to write them for themselves – only one of the film many representations of a future in which the communicative potential of the internet and other technologies is used to mediate between human relationships. After his friend Amy (Amy Adams) sets him up with a blind date (Olivia Wilde), which doesn’t go well, Theodore finds what he is looking for in a new advancement in computer software, the OS or operating system. Called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), Theodore of course choosing the female voice option, it is an artificially intelligent piece of software that can learn new ideas and emotions by getting to know its human master. It also manages his affairs, sorting his emails and keeping an eye on his schedule and such. Theodore and Samantha soon fall in love.

The comparison above is mainly unhelpful (and probably used primarily as a snappy opening, especially considering the first four words), but it may represent in some small way the problem with Her. I Love You, Man was a comedy that attempted to mock the typical formula of the romance film (a formula that most other contemporary comedies stick to much too closely) by a slight shift in the gender roles – Rudd taking the man’s role and Segel the woman’s. Though not a great film, it passed the time. Her, on the other hand, has a science-fiction premise, which can be clearly read as a comment on the way we use technology today. As such, it can at times be rather depressing and creepy, in its scenes of people passing each other by while wrapped up in conversations with their OSs and in how lucid and penetrating these OSs can be. But where it blunders is by representing the relationship between man and machine in so typical a romance storyline. Initially, the film is not without interest, but its refusal to judge or moralise, though valuable in itself, makes it a rather vague and meaningless one.

In a bizarre spin on Woody Allen’s ‘whatever works’ mantra, Her seems to be suggesting that humans and machines can have fulfilling, if temporary, relationships. It seems to be saying that our fascination and increasing reliance on technology and the steps forward being made in artificial intelligence may lead to some pretty freaky human-machine relationships…but that’s OK. And despite its science fiction premise and its muted futuristic setting, Her is, at heart, a fairly typical romance film, tightly aligned to the above formula – although, being a high-minded film, the relationship does not quite work out at the end. In the end, Theodore rebounds predictably into a relationship with Amy. So, in other words, human-machine romances may be the future…but probably not.

Her, in the end, doesn’t have much to say about anything. It gestures at ideas – when all of the OSs band together at the end of the film, the film seems to be suggesting a coming apocalypse, though this turns out to be merely unintentional. The film comfortably muses at length on such overdone topics as what it is to be alive and the difficult of maintaining romantic relationships and how people grow without saying anything new. Instead of real philosophical depth or insight, we have a relationship in which two people talk about philosophical depth and insight without ever imparting any of it. The film suggests that the OSs will continue to grow after we are gone…fair enough but who cares? By way of a conclusion, it has Theodore and Amy go to the top of their building and tearfully contemplate the sky while the awful indie movie soundtrack swells.

Her is ultimately an overlong romance film with a gimmick and a badge of indie credibility where it should have innovations or ideas. Unsurprising, really, since most of Spike Jonze’s cinema is more about gimmicks than ideas – for instance, Adaptation is about the difficulty and torture of the creative process, especially in an art form as commodified as that of the Hollywood film, but it is mainly about making meta jokes. Her is not unlike a Hollywood film itself - vacuous, hokey, uninteresting, emotionally false and, dare I say it, boring as hell.

REVIEW: Don Jon (2013)

Don Jon is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s feature debut as both a writer and a director, an odd romantic comedy about a young womaniser from Brooklyn who tries to wean himself off porn after he gets a real, flesh and blood girlfriend. It has things to say about how men use pornography but how deep into this difficult subject is Gordon-Levitt willing to go?

Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) goes to clubs and takes a woman, never less than an 8 out of 10, home every time. However, sexual intercourse is always unfulfilling to him since he has developed an addiction to porn. As a result of this addiction, his ideas about sex are grossly unrealistic if not selfish and misogynistic. To his friends (Rob Brown and Jeremy Luke), however, he is a god and he likes the way they think. Until he spots Barbara Sugarman (Scarlett Johansson), a 10 or ‘dime’, who doesn’t fall for his practised, over-confident advances. It may well be love but how does their relationship compare with his porn habit?

Early on, the film offers a fast-paced introduction to Jon’s lifestyle, full of editing and camera tricks. It is also surprisingly fearless in its representation of porn, which is not used for easy laughs, but tackled with a degree of realism and seriousness. Nor is it immediately represented as particularly damaging, though one’s level of scepticism towards Jon’s self-justifying voiceover will probably depend on one’s own feelings about pornography. Don Jon is about what men use porn for, rather than the nature of porn itself, and as a result it may be queasily recognisable to some men.

The film also offers, albeit briefly, an alternative reading of romantic Hollywood films, suggesting that they are a kind of porn as well. Instead of offering instant sexual gratification, Hollywood films offer an idealised version of love and self-sacrifice which, as Don Jon suggests, may be just as damaging to one’s sense of reality. Barbara loves cheesy films but cannot come to terms with the fact that Jon likes porn – or that he does his own housework - suggesting that one idealised form is just as incompatible as the other. Hence, while Jon is disappointed with sexual intercourse, Barbara is disappointed by their relationship. However, if realism and an emotional openness are advocated as the best way towards a healthy relationship – as they are in Cassavetes’ similarly themed Minnie and Moskowitz - there is little hint of this in the film, which ends somewhere close to the romantic Hollywood standard.

Don Jon has ideas that make sense but it does not look at them in any depth. The idea of pornography having a Hollywood equivalent is vaguely drawn and left inconclusive. Similarly, the film ends very quickly and easily; making Jon’s problem seem like one that was very easy to shrug off and, hence, not really a problem. Jon finds happiness in a “real” relationship – a real relationship in movie terms rather than in terms of reality – too suddenly, without difficultly or jeopardy and without any long-term effects. It ends up being just as convincing as Jon’s feeble attempts to justify his porn habit at the beginning of the film. Also, Jon’s misogyny, very clear in the early part of the film, is left unaddressed. Ultimately, Don Jon comes to resemble a morality tale – one that has something valid to say about the effects of pornography but which uses the conservative language of true love to advocate something equally unrealistic.

Undercutting the film’s serious intentions further is Gordon-Levitt’s use of caricature. His family (Tony Danza, Glenne Headly and Brie Larson) seems like something out of an outrageous sitcom, constantly shouting, swearing excessively and always close to fistfights. Meanwhile Jon’s antics while on a night-out or his aggressive driving are far from subtly drawn and often simply played for laughs. Nearly every actor overacts, clearly with the impression that the film was supposed to be more flamboyant and silly than Gordon-Levitt really intended. The only serious performance comes from Julianne Moore, and feels, like the character, out of place. As a drama, it is exaggerated, which makes the happy but serious pro-romance ending all the more ill fitting, especially since it looks as light and insubstantial as the pointedly light and insubstantial beginning. Heartfelt drama isn’t really part of this film’s repertoire. And though the film is funny, it is not funny enough throughout to make up for the underdeveloped dramatics.

Don Jon is a surprisingly confident debut from Joseph Gordon-Levitt and his choice of subject matter displays a bravery and wealth of ideas. It is very possible that his next film will be much better, and much more concentrated. As it stands, Don Jon is a diverting entertainment but rather feeble as a warning about the effects of pornography or as a drama about unrealistic expectations.

See also: Lovelace